A Coimbra Firm of 35 People Lands Its Biggest Order Yet, and Its Parts Will Reach Venus in 2031
Active Space Technologies will build 340 structural components for a European satellite constellation, worth up to EUR 3 million, with deliveries running to June 2028. Its hardware is also booked onto ESA missions to Venus, the Sun and Jupiter.
A company of about 35 people, working out of Coimbra, has just signed the largest purchase order in its history: 340 structural components for satellites, worth between €2.5 million and €3 million, to be delivered monthly until June 2028. Active Space Technologies will not name the customer, saying only that it is a European operator of what it calls the world's second-largest satellite constellation. Six of the company's parts will fly on every spacecraft in it.
For a firm with an annual turnover of roughly €4 million, an order of that size is a step change. It is also the pay-off from a long courtship: Active Space has been working with the same operator for four and a half years, starting with components for two test satellites, and has now been promoted to a certified supplier for the full production run.
Parts bound for Venus, and for the Sun
Founded in 2004 and part of Marco Galinha's Grupo Bel since 2018, Active Space splits its work between commercial constellations and the slower, stranger business of science missions. It devotes some 50,000 hours a year to science and Earth observation, and its hardware is already booked onto a run of European Space Agency flights: Plato, the exoplanet hunter due to launch in March 2027; Ariel, in 2031; and EnVision, the Venus orbiter scheduled for November 2031. Company parts are also riding on missions to the Sun, Mercury and Jupiter.
Its customer list reads like a roll-call of European primes: Airbus, Thales Alenia Space, OHB in Germany, Beyond Gravity and APCO in Switzerland, Sener in Spain, ICEYE in Finland. That is the position the Portuguese space sector has been quietly building toward, supplying the specialist pieces rather than the whole spacecraft.
Looking to the Gulf, not to Texas
Chief executive Filipe Castanheira says the next growth market is the Middle East, and specifically Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which Active Space is prospecting through an internationalisation programme run by the trade agency AICEP. There is budget there, he argues, along with the appetite to build capabilities the region currently lacks, across defence, dual-use technology and telecommunications. First contact could come at a Dubai trade expo in November; the early work will be visits and visibility rather than contracts.
The United States, by contrast, is on the list of things not being done. Castanheira's reasoning is practical: the American market rewards suppliers with people on the ground, and the company has none. He has not ruled it out for later.
A sector that keeps adding pieces
The order lands in a Portuguese space industry that has been accumulating small wins rather than headline launches. In the past few months a British satellite firm set up in Porto and began recruiting 50 people, an antenna farm outside Sintra angled for a role in the EU's answer to Starlink, and the European Space Agency's Oeiras incubator opened a fresh call for startups. A Marinha Grande factory, meanwhile, now machines titanium parts for Saab's fighters.
Castanheira also expects defence to open up, through the European Defence Fund and the EU's new SAFE loan instrument. Active Space has no defence projects running today. On his reading, that will not be true for long.
